


right here

by Quilly



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, Depression, Gen, in which caretaker jane desperately needs a break, minor self-harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-03
Updated: 2017-09-03
Packaged: 2018-12-23 09:54:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11987403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quilly/pseuds/Quilly
Summary: With her dad in hospice care now and her life in shambles, Jane Crocker is in desperate need of a break from herself.





	right here

**Author's Note:**

> Needed to help work through some stuff so obviously fanfiction about an unrelated matter is the way to do it. Pretty in-depth discussion of depression in here, so be warned about that.

Your name is Jane Crocker and that in and of itself is not a fact you enjoy.

This year has been hard. Like, really hard. As in father-is-in-hospital, drop-out-of-school, credit-score-is-screwed kind of hard. Your dad’s home now, but if you needed the reminder, the hospice nurse came in to check on you a couple hours ago and informed you that his vitals are holding steady, for now. You thanked her. You shut the door to your room. You haven’t moved from your bed since.

Along with the hospice nurse, your friends and John’s have been staying over in rotations, helping around the house and trying to lessen the burden on the two of you, but really, there’s no need. Or no use, rather. You know exactly what’s going to happen. It’s just a matter of when. And then after that…you don’t know. You really don’t. Your sleep schedule is dictated by the baby monitor next to your bed, broadcasting your father’s breathing. He sleeps so much now.

This week is Dirk and Rose’s turn to be over, and you honestly tried to dissuade your friends from the endeavor. You’re fine, you protested, and John agreed, but you are both friends with stubborn knuckleheads, and if you’re being honest you appreciate the company more than the help. That said, Rose has been by every hour on the dot to knock on your door and ask if you would like tea, and you’ve told her no every time. Dirk, as far as you know, is still tinkering with the AC unit, it’s been breaking every few weeks this past summer and now that it’s getting chilly you really don’t want to be without it.

You stare at a blank spot on the wall, eyes half-closed, feeling like lead. Every part of you is heavy and sluggish, and if you continue down this train of thought you know exactly which drain you’re going to circle, and you’re so tired…so tired. You don’t want to enumerate all the ways you’ve failed just in the past year, and how those failures are manifesting as the extra weight puddling around your stomach and arms and chin. You don’t want to think about how you haven’t washed your hair in a couple of days and really need to. You especially don’t want to think about the hunger pains mixing with the aftertaste of Twinkies in your mouth and making you nauseous. Under your bed is littered with the wrappers. Four in less than an hour. You’ve really made a pig of yourself today. You haven’t even gone in to see your dad.

He coughs, the sound grainy through the baby monitor, and your heart stutters as your body freezes, hanging on the crackle of static as your father tries to get his breathing back under control. After an agonizing minute, he settles, mumbling grumpily under his breath. You can’t understand what he said, but you can imagine him cursing out his illness and almost smile.

There’s another knock on your door, and you prepare to tell Rose no, you don’t want tea, thank you, but it opens, and Dirk slips in, closing it behind him. He’s washed his hands recently but he has a few oily smudges on his shirt and face.

“Fixed it,” he says, and pulls his shirt off, scrubbing his face and hair with it. You catch a whiff of sweat and wrinkle your nose. “Gonna shower.” You nod, and Dirk grabs his duffel and slips back out. You aren’t sure if you’re pleased or numb over the fact that he didn’t seem to notice you’ve been on your bed all day. All day. Like a lazy bum. An ungrateful lazy bum. You close your eyes as an angry feeling like ants drilling through your chest takes over, wishing you’d just sleep, knowing you won’t. You listen to your father breathe, to the shower down the hall, to John and Rose laughing in the living room. It all washes over you without moving you. Without you quite knowing why you dig your nails into your palms, fighting back a stupid wave of tears.

Dirk’s return to your room finds you thus engaged in your battle with misery, and you sit up hurriedly, scrubbing at your face and attempting to hide behind a turned head and flurry of activity to make it look like you were doing something, cleaning your room, maybe. It’s filthy, by your standards. You let your laundry pile up again.

“Gonna grab a bite, you want anything?” Dirk asks, and you shake your head, not trusting your voice right now. You feel him hesitate, then walk towards the door, then stop. The awkwardness in the room is palpable, and you are holding desperately to your self-control, waiting for him to go so you can go to shambles again behind your closed door. In that moment, your stomach chooses to growl.

“I’m fine,” you say, too loudly and too quickly, refusing to look over still because your eyes are full of angry tears. Dirk sighs, somewhere between impatient and pitying, and sits on your bed in front of you.

“No, you’re not,” he says quietly. You’re squeezing your eyes shut, hands now grinding over your closed lids hard to try and stop the liquid from escaping, but it’s falling over your cheeks and your breathing is fast and shallow and you can’t stop it anymore, you just can’t, it’s too much. You go from zero to sixty in no time at all; your body heaves with the force of your body rebelling against your brain, you haven’t cried like this since you were a child, and you’re doing all of this in front of Dirk Strider, who is probably looking at you and wishing he could get away but not wanting to be rude. You want to tell him to go, you wish you could do anything but cry hysterically right now, but you’re in the thick of it, swept away in the tide of your emotions, and couldn’t speak if you tried.

Abruptly warm arms surround you and awkwardly cradle your head into a shoulder, patting your back and your hair and making low, quiet _ssshhhhh_ noises. You latch onto Dirk’s shirt and feel like that contact is the only thing keeping you together right now, because if you let go, you’ll be blasted apart by the force of everything coming out of you right now, little specks of Jane-dust scattered to the farthest corners of the universe. You are being dramatic and ridiculous and you should stop crying, because it’s not like you’re the one dying here, Jane Crocker, you aren’t the one suffering—

You are unsure of how long you sob into Dirk’s shirt, but it’s soaked through by the time your breath comes in hiccups instead of gasps and your legs are numb from the positioning. Dirk didn’t let go of you once, though his hands long stopped rubbing circles into your back and just held on, tight enough to let you know he wasn’t going anywhere, loose enough to let you move back, which you do, trying to mop your face up with the towel he must have left on the floor from his shower (it smells like him, anyway).

“I’m—sorry,” you say, your voice still jerky from the tears coming in odd spurts, “I’m—I’m just being stupid—”

“No, you’re not,” Dirk says, and you laugh humorlessly. “Jane. Look at me.”

It takes effort, but you do, your eyes peeking from the towel, shame making you unwilling to do much more. Dirk puts his hands on your knees, soothing his thumbs over your skin (your unshaved, stupid, dimpled skin), looking at you with intensity. You look down, unable to hold his gaze for long, and see how large the wet patch on his shirt is, the places you also got snot on it, gross. He squeezes your knees and you look back up at his face.

“You’re not being stupid,” he says, and digs his fingers into your knees when you shake your head. “You’re not. You’re having one hellhole of a year and I am amazed you’re still hanging on. Like. You realize how awesome you are, right? Taking care of your dad, looking after your brother, working a job—that’s amazing.”

You bury your face in the towel, then resurface after a minute, eyes and nose. “Should be doing better,” you mumble, then put the towel down entirely, rubbing your sore eyes. “Should still be in school, keeping up with loan payments. Should be cleaning the house better. Need to be doing more.”

“No,” Dirk says, and a corner of your mouth lifts but it doesn’t reach your eyes. “That’s the entire point behind the hospice nurse and behind us. The nurse is taking care of your dad in all the ways you can’t, because you don’t have a medical degree. We—your friends—are trying to take care of the rest. School can always be picked up later, and your loans…we can work on those. Talk to somebody, maybe, about need-based payments.” You twist your hands in the towel, and Dirk’s hands move from your knees to your own hands. “Hey. Crocker. Eyes up here for a sec.”

You oblige him, though it feels like a titanic effort. Dirk—stoic, impassive Dirk, with his quick wit and deadpan expression that never changes—is looking at you now with a look you can only describe as tender. He leans forward, presses his forehead to yours, and squeezes your hands.

“Hey,” he murmurs. “It’s gonna be okay. You don’t have to do this all by yourself. You’re not weak for needing help.”

Your eyes overflow again, but gentler; they don’t take your breathing down with them. You squeeze his hands back, meeting his gaze and then dropping it, meeting and dropping, until eventually you just close your eyes and breathe. He breathes with you, and when you open your eyes and look at him again, he picks his head up and kisses where his forehead was a moment ago.

“I’m gonna get some food,” he says into your hair. “We’re gonna eat it, we can do it in here if you want, and then we’re gonna watch some movies. I’m gonna be right here all night, okay?”

“Okay,” you say, and Dirk kisses your head again before standing and pulling on his sneakers. He flashes a smile as he slides on his shades and leaves your room, and in his absence you hunt for clean clothes. It feels like shower time.

He brings you chicken nuggets and a chocolate shake, and then you start to whittle down your Netflix queue together, your head on his chest while he strokes your hair and makes inappropriate comments about the actors and the story to make you laugh. It isn’t much, really, but it’s something. It’s something.


End file.
